Vain (The Seven Deadly, #1)(26)

I opened the door and filed out in front of my audience of two.

Karina gasped. “Oh, dear Lord, Sophie. You scared me. I didn’t expect you to be up and ready so early.” She laughed. She eyed me and her hands came to rest on her hips. “Well, don’t you look a sight! My dear, you are a breathtaking girl.”

“Thank you,” I told her, knowing she was just being kind.

“Shall we?” she asked, grabbing my hand without asking. She started leading us to the second largest building on the property, just to the right of the main building, the center of the large half circle of buildings. To the right of the kitchens were the bathhouses. Just to the left of the main building and to the right of the remaining staff living quarters, was Charles and Karina’s house I deduced. I could tell because it was a bit more established-looking over the other residential huts, had a proper roof as opposed to the thatched roofs of the other buildings. To the left of their house was what I assumed was Kate’s and the other staff’s double hut and to the left of those was mine and Dingane’s. In the center of the property was the largest tree I’d ever seen in my entire life.

“What kind of tree is that?” I asked Karina, astonished that I was just then noticing it.

“It’s a baobab tree,” she smiled sweetly at me.

It looked like a giant bonsai, thick trunk, easily twenty feet around the base, and reached to impossible heights before its canopy shot flat and spread out to a radius of a hundred feet easily.

“It’s beautiful.”

“I know,” she said, patting its trunk as we passed by it.

“It’s always been here. Always.”

“Stalwart, is it?” I asked.

Karina smiled at me. “Yes, much like my Charles.”

I returned the easy smile and felt a little of my anxiety begin to melt away.

The kitchens were small and I wondered how they fed them all with such meager operations. I looked around me and saw tables overflowing with laughing children.

“How many are there?” I asked.

“Fifty-nine,” she said succinctly. “We’re only equipped to handle twenty.”

“How do you manage?” I asked quietly, taking in the expanse of children.

“We just do. Lots of faith, my love. It always works out in the end. Somehow. Somehow we turn thirty beds into sixty. Somehow we stretch our food to impossible measures. Somehow we survive on our impossibly meager income. Somehow we love them all equally. Somehow.”

I swallowed away my disbelief because there was proof in this pudding. Somehow they did it.

“Now,” she began brightly, “breakfast will not be what you are expecting, I’m guessing, but it’s food nonetheless and you’ll get used to it.” She looked at me then.

“I keep saying that, don’t I?” She laughed loudly. “Poor dear.”

“I’ll be just fine,” I told her sincerely as I watched a little boy with one hand try to steady his bowl.

Suddenly, Dingane came from out of nowhere. I hadn’t been prepared to see him yet and my chest felt like it was hit with the atom bomb. My veins ran warmly all over my body and my face flushed. I watched as he placed what appeared to be a little scrap of rubber underneath the boy’s bowl. It didn’t budge from its place and the boy looked on Dingane with a brilliant smile. I felt an incredible urge to hug both boys, maybe Dingane a little closer than was socially acceptable. My blood ran hot in that moment. What the hell is wrong with me?

“Sit, my dear,” Karina said, pointing to a chair at a table near the door. “That’s where the adults sit unless one of the children needs us, which is nearly all the time,” she joked. “I’ll bring you your plate this morning. At lunch, just walk up to the window and Kate will hand you your meal.”

“Thank you, Karina.”

I sat at the table and the little girl with the missing arm came up to me. “Hi,” she said sheepishly.

“You speak English?” I asked her, bewildered.

“Karina teach me,” she answered brokenly.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She touched the middle of her chest with her remaining hand and answered, “Mandisa.”

“It’s-It’s nice to meet you, Mandisa,” I told the baby girl, awkwardly tripping on my words. I was so unaccustomed to talking to children, let alone an amputee.

She smiled at me and picked up the hand I had resting on my leg. I began to pull the hand back but something in her eyes told me it was okay, that she was just a human girl, and a beautiful one at that.

I tentatively squeezed her little hand and she giggled, sending a warm, tingling sensation up my arm and into my heart.

“Have you eaten, Mandisa?” I asked her.

The smile dropped from her face and she ran off, disappearing behind the kitchen doors.

“What did I say?” I asked the air in front of me, stunned she’d fled.

“She doesn’t eat,” I heard a voice say from behind me. Dingane. My blood began to boil once more.

I turned toward him. “What do you mean she doesn’t eat? How does she stay alive?”

“She drinks. For days after she first arrived we couldn’t even get her to do that.”

“Why?” I asked him as he sat across from me.